1. Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of application installation and uninstallation, and more particularly to detecting and curing application installation and unstallation failures.
2. Description of the Related Art
Though often overlooked, application installation is a prerequisite to interacting with a software application. Specifically, in most circumstances, an application can be properly executed only subsequent to the completion of a successful installation process. At the minimum, a typical software application installation requires a transfer of files to the file structure of a computing system, and the configuration of the computing system to particularly interact with the software application. Ordinarily, the configuration of the computing system includes the addition or modification of registry settings, the addition or modification of entries to one or more initialization files, or both.
In contrast to the process of installing an application, uninstalling an application, in an era of complex software applications, requires an equally as sophisticated uninstallation process. In that regard, while it can be a simple enough task simply to delete those files from the computing system which are associated with the uninstalled application, in many cases, the files which are to be deleted are requisite to the operation of other applications which are not to be deleted—namely application libraries and such. Also, to the extent that the computing system had been configured for operation with the deleted application, the configuration data ought to be removed from the computing system. Typically, the complete removal of configuration data in the course of an uninstallation process will require further editing of the system registry, one or more system initialization files, or both.
At the outset of an uninstallation process, it is assumed by the uninstallation process that the application to be uninstalled at least had been successfully installed some time prior to the initiation of the uninstallation process. That is to say, in order to effectively remove application files and configuration settings which ought to have been installed in a complete manner some time in the past, it is assumed that indeed the application files and configuration settings were installed in a complete manner. Of course, as will be recognized by one skilled in the art, the complete installation of application files and configuration settings can never be guaranteed as the installation process often fails for a variety of reasons, including missing dependencies, inadequate system resources, power outages, file and system resource access restrictions, and missing installation files.
In the context of single system application installations, the issue of a failed installation can be handled to the extent that the failed installation will be apparent to the installer and the application simply can be reinstalled. Moreover, various commercial tools have been developed to uninstall previously partially installed applications. More particularly, such commercial tools typically scan registry entries and the entries of system configuration files seeking out unaffiliated fragments. Such fragments can be removed as can unaffiliated application libraries which seemingly have not been accessed by any one application in recent memory.
While the conventional process of handling failed installations and uninstallations can suffice for single system applications, in the context of bundled application suites formed from the dynamic composition of multiple independently installed applications, installations can fail more frequently, particularly where pre-requisite applications are missing from the target host. Also, as each application component can be independent of other application components in the application suite or set, it can be difficult even to detect an improperly installed portion of the application suite. In that regard, the individual application components of a bundled suite of applications often lack installation and uninstallation logic. In an era of autonomic computing and Web services, however, computing devices are meant to be “self-configuring”, “self-managing” and “self-healing”.